- Telcos that can meet construction targets and exercise financial discipline are juicy M&A prospects, said Greenlight Network CEO Mark Murphy
- Private equity firms are sitting on more than $2 trillion that they're eager to spend on deals, said Deloitte's Tim Haaf
- 2025 saw several big deals, but uncertainty in the broader economy chilled private equity investment
2025 has been a big year for telecom consolidation, but there’s still plenty of M&A milk to churn on the regional level.
Mark Murphy, CEO of Greenlight Networks, said companies that have shown they can “build at their forecasted rate consistently” are a hot commodity for operators and private equity seeking new blood.
It sounds simple, but broadband “is a hard business, it takes a lot of human capital as well as financial capital to grow and you better be growing,” he told Fierce.
Murphy likened the industry to the real estate business. You need to pick the right location, “you’ve got to build it at the price you said, because that’s going to be part of your investment assumptions and model…and then when people are in there you’ve got to take care of the building.”
He noted every operator is going to have bumps on the road, whether that’s dealing with utilities, municipalities or “other things that are maybe outside your control.” The difference will be those companies who can still hit their numbers consistently and at a certain price.
As M&A activity accelerates, “I think there’s going to be certainly a premium to be paid for companies like that,” said Murphy.
Greenlight is one of many regional fiber players with an appetite for acquisition. This year, it announced deals to buy FastBridge Fiber and Loop Internet, both of which will expand Greenlight’s fiber passings count. But what’s different between the two ISPs is the talent Greenlight’s acquiring, Murphy pointed out.
Loop was “a much more construction-heavy company, so we picked up a lot of construction crews and resources related to that,” he said. Whereas FastBridge “is going to bring additional sales and marketing talent as well as some construction management and project management resources.”
Private equity hungers for more M&A
Murphy spoke at a Broadband Nation Expo session on the state of telecom M&A. Several big deals came to fruition in 2025, but panelists noted there’s still a great deal of demand that hasn’t been realized. This year had a lot of uncertainty around interest rates, tariffs and how the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program will pan out, said Tim Haaf, principal at Deloitte Consulting.
Haaf estimated private equity firms have over $2 trillion sitting on their balance sheets, “near record levels of dry powder.”
“They want to make deals. They want to exit out of the deals they’ve already made,” Haaf said.
PE is now active “in every sector of telecom” and waiting to see how the landscape will shake out, Haaf said.
Investors are hungry for new deals, and they want to diversify. “In a lot of cases, the investors also need a path out in a way to liquidate and monetize their investments as the [total addressable market] shrinks around them and the opportunities for growth reduce,” Murphy said on the panel.
2026 will likely see PE be disciplined with their investments, Haaf said, so he doubts we’ll have any more “$5-10 plus billion dollar deals” in the telecom space.
As companies try to divest their non-core assets, that’s another opportunity for private equity to jump in, he added.
“Tower businesses are getting rid of their wireless providers, service providers are getting rid of their data centers and vice versa,” Haaf said. “That’s an area where private equity, I expect, [will] continue to be very active.”